I’ve worked in Slides for a few hours now and have run into some bugs and possible quality-of-life improvements that could be made. I think the product has a lot of potential so far, for what it’s worth! It’s off to a great start and I think it will be super helpful for me.
Good things
The default unstyled slides provided by Figma are simple and high-quality. They’re working great as a basis for building my own custom template. Would love to have more diagrams available in the official library Figma provides.
QOL improvements
Command + R doesn’t work to rename layers, and you can’t batch rename layers. As a layer-namer this has broken my flow a lot. Implemented
Managing the text styles has been a little weird, because the editing features seem to be split between slides mode and design mode. I understand that once I have the design and styles set up the idea is probably that I won’t need to edit them in design mode too much (thus keeping slides mode UI cleaner and more focused on content), but since I’m making a new template I have had to bounce back and forth between the modes to update the text styles with the level of granularity that I want.
Using color variables from external libraries is a little weird. The variables can be applied in design mode, but when I’m back in slides mode the variables aren’t referenced, and they appear as raw HEX values. Not sure if this is the intended behavior or not, or what best practice would be.
I can’t pull in a library unless it has at least one published component in it. This was a problem because I have a general purpose library that I use which consists only of color variables, and I had to publish a dummy component in order to pull the color variables into Slides.
I haven’t figured out an easy way to apply the same layout grids to every slide. I can copy them from slide to slide but this has been a pain in-practice. I find myself setting the same grids manually over and over.
The behavior of frames with constraints applied to them automatically snapping to layout grids has felt a little weird in practice. I realize this is a super old Figma frames behavior that is often desirable but as it’s happening in Slides it’s not always what I expect to happen, and I’m not sure that people who aren’t familiar with layout grids would understand what is happening here.
I don’t have an exhaustive list, but not all of the selection hotkeys that I’m used to in Figma design files are available and that’s slowing me down.
By default, slides have that rounded edge in the editor, but that’s not always what I want to see, even if they are not rounded in presentation mode. And, when I export flat images of the slides, the corners are rounded in the exported image and that’s definitely not what I want.
Bugs
Every once in a while, the list of slides in the left pane disappears and I need to refresh the file to get them to reappear. Unsure what I’m doing that causes it to disappear but it’s happened 4–5 times. Potentially fixed, haven’t experienced in a while
Alignment hotkeys don’t always work—especially when I am aligning to the slide boundaries. Seems to be fixed
I can only zoom out so far. Possibly the intended behavior? Not an issue for me anymore
Holding Alt to measure distance between objects only works for measuring between objects, and not to the edges of the slide. This has made it tricky sometimes to position items relative to the slide edges. Seems to be fixed
Edited: Struck out some of my original items which have now been addressed.
AFAICT, there’s no way to set colours on template slides. So I need to use a template slide, then change it’s colours ever single time in order to match brand. This seems like a overly steep cliff. (upgrade to organisation) in order to change the colours on a template.
For someone reasona, exported slides cannot mask elements that fall outside the slide boundary. They include all the design elements. The exported slides are also huge (10mb) in size for just 2-3 pictures and any design elements near the edges become rounded since Figma slides use a rounded rectangle as slide canvas.
When I have a frame selected and try to paste an element into it from the clipboard, the object does not get pasted into the selected frame like it does in Figma Design.
I can’t drag and drop elements into frames—no matter what I do they will not nest automatically on the canvas and I have to drag them manually in the layers panel.
One more item i noticed I hope someone on the team catches is in Tables i cant merge cells. While they’re at it let us change the styling for it please
Going to +1 to a few comments on this thread to help quantify some of the importance of these things…
Brian’s note on the text styles being hard to manage. I totally agree to this - I didn’t know how to change template colors once I defined them. I tried googling it and couldn’t find anything to help me figure out how to change the colors in the templates. I found out today that the little ‘Edit Style’ icon button is discoverable only in Slides Mode (not Designer Mode). And in Slides Mode, the ‘Edit Style’ icon button is only visible when you hover over the currently selected fill color, rather than all fill colors. It would be great if editing styles was accessible to both Slides Mode + Designer Mode. Also, I’m already used to seeing the little icon when I hover over any color styles in Figma, rather than just the current color style that I’m using. Can we make that button larger (hard to spot the small circle) & visible to all color styles?
Rounded corners on the Slide exports… Also not something I want when exporting a deck to send out to clients.
Holding Alt to measure distance to Slide edges. Would love to see the distance from an object to the edge of the slide, please!
Some more things I’ve noticed:
When editing colors in Figma, I just have to hit my ‘Enter’ key on the keyboard for the changes to take place. It’s an extra step in Slides - I have to click the ‘Save’ button for the color to update. If I tap outside after hitting ‘Enter’ (out of habit from using Figma), then the variable color change doesn’t save. Would be great if pressing ‘Enter’ also updates the changes, similar to Figma.
I usually use the ‘show / hide UI’ shortcut in Figma to hide the panels when I want to focus on what I’m designing. It would be great if this shortcut was also included in Slides, so I don’t have to go into Presentation Mode
As a heavy shortcuts user, it would be great if I could just move around slides in the left panel using the ‘Send Backward’ / ‘Send Forward’ shortcuts, instead of clicking & holding with my mouse.
Additional QOL
• Need “full” fullscreen. The inability to put the slide edge to edge in presenter mode is a mood killer. So many clients have the zoom/meet window really small, and if youre not presenting the deck in fullscreen, they often ask for you to “zoom in” etc…
My team would love a way to restart the embedded Figma prototypes in Slides. And having access to all the hot key options that are available with the usual prototype view.
The ability to “hide” a slide from the deck was nice to finally be added.
However the inability to select multiple sides to hide is not an option. Unless I am missing a special feature do so outside of select my slides, right-click to bring up menu to hide.
It would be super cool to have the same principle of pages as a Figma file, and thus have a single slides file for multiple presentations instead of one presentation = 1 file
(love Figma slides update though!! thx)
I wanted to add a +1 here, specially regarding color variables shifting from a Figma file to an Slides file.
I want to preserve my variables so that I can have a template with both light and dark modes, but when migrating my slides, all variables are replaced and my modes are gone. Only solution I see for now is creating 2 templates, which isn’t ideal.
To add to the list here, I noticed that instance swaps within components get reset when you copy/paste frames into slides. This is super frustrating especially if you’re using an icon library that requires instance swaps on components.
Valentina, it might not work with moving slides from design files to slides files, but in case you didn’t realize, variable modes do still work in Slides. If you’re doing your dark theme with modes you can toggle that mode on the slide level (but not on the presentation level, as far as I can tell).
I just enabled my library with the variables in the slides file and have access to all my variables and their modes. It’s not perfect using them but it works. Note that in order to enable an external library in a Slides file, the library needs to have at least one published component in it too (it can’t be just variables for some reason).
Thank you! I’m actually able to see the variables on the slide level, problem is that for some reason some of my variables reset when I migrate to slides, for example all my text-primary variables got broken and changed to a Color 1 variable, that falls under template colors and not the collection with modes I previously created.
Not sure if this is expected behavior or not, but it’s not even letting me re-change the color to its original value, I have my library added to the file but it won’t let me apply the variable, which is weird.
